Alternate Scene by the Lake 2
by Rumour of an Alchemist
Summary: What if the scene after the fifth year OWL exam, where in canon Lily and Severus break apart, is interrupted by the advent of a Lovecraftian horror - a symptom that all is not well at Hogwarts? Alternate Universe. Warning! Messy character death. Minor corrections made March 2013.
1. Part 1, The horror from the lake

(Minor corrections to text, March 2013)

Disclaimer:

I am not J K Rowling. I do not own Harry Potter.

I am not H P Lovecraft. I do not own shoggoths, _The Necronomicon_, the Dunwich Horror, the power of Ibn-Ghazi, or various other accoutrements, families, or trappings of the Cthulhu mythos.

Warning! Shoggoth involvement! Messy character death implied. This story is identified as 'horror'.

Further note: This is set in an alternate Harry Potter universe, which crosses over with that of the Cthulhu Mythos. Some details such as which exam has just been sat and how many others were present vary a bit. Others such as what the heck is going on that year vary quite substantially.

* * *

><p>There were ripples spreading on the surface of the lake, as the group of fifth year students, lost in their own little dramas, stood and shouted at one another, and traded spells. Ripples which were gradually increasing at their point of origin, as the tensions rose on the shore. There was something unnatural in the air right now about that spot on the shore, otherwise on such a sunny day, just after an exam session was over, there might have been more students than this handful of Gryffindors and a lone Slytherin assembled.<p>

The fifth year History of Magic exam was just done, and the gang of four Gryffindor students known as 'The Marauders' had stalked and attacked their favourite target from Slytherin, Severus Snape.

Lily Evans swept onto the scene, intent upon making a speech which would lead to the breakdown of a beautiful friendship and over two decades of misery for the majority of those involved, when she was mercifully cut short as the source of the ripples started to break the surface of the lake a hundred yards or so out. It was something which was making doggedly for the shore.

She closed her mouth and turned to gape.

"What in Merlin's name is that? That's not the giant squid."

Out on the lake a small pile of dark bubbles of something like oily black scum had surfaced, and as it headed in their general direction, the pile seemed to swell and expand as if more of it were rising up from underneath the water.

The others turned and gaped. Even Severus Snape, dangling in mid-air, did so.

"Good question, Evans." James Potter stared.

"Maybe it's one of Snivellus' bogies." Sirius Black sniggered.

It was closer now, and a strange bubbling whistle was starting to emanate from it. Whatever it was, it was _big_.

And suddenly Severus Snape blanched.

"It's a shoggoth. I've been telling you idiots for weeks that Professor Whateley was more than just a kind professor who was here on a one-year contract from the States. Put me down, you idiots! Put me down!"

There was rising panic in his voice.

"It's just a big pile of scum. Or maybe one of Professor Slughorn's potions experiments gone wrong." James Potter turned to Severus. "Nothing to be scared of at all."

"…_Elly-lee, elly-lee…_" The whistling bubbling sound was getting stronger as more and more of the creature emerged from the water.

Lily frowned and sent a _liberacorpus_ in Severus' direction. He dropped to the ground.

"How big is that thing, anyway?" Sirius pondered. There were now a good half-dozen feet of it visible, and it was surging faster and faster as it came closer to the shore.

"You… imbeciles." Severus was almost shrieking, as he desperately scrabbled and retrieved his wand. "Haven't you ever read _The Necronomicon_? Or those old reports Lovegood sent to the head of each house six months ago? It's too late to outrun it now. Or get a message to the professors. It's approximately fifteen feet of nightmarish, head-ripping, death."

"Oh, relax Severus, it's just a big pile of froth and foam. Or maybe you're scared because you think it's a giant shampoo monster." James Potter jeered. He flicked his wand at the approaching menace. "_Incendio_. Look: there, no problem."

The jet of flame which engulfed the creature for a moment left it steaming slightly, but otherwise seemed to leave it little harmed.

"Ah." said James Potter. "That didn't work as well as I thought it would. _Incendio! Incendio!_"

The next moment, a barrage of fire spells were flying from the wands of Potter, Black, and Pettigrew at the creature, as the sound it was making increased. It slowed slightly under the barrage of fire spells, but otherwise did not seem much deterred.

Remus Lupin tried a couple of stunning spells on it, but to little apparent effect. Lily sent some slowing jinxes which may or may not have affected it. It was difficult to tell.

Severus was desperately pacing up and down, muttering to himself.

"What are you doing, Sev?" She shouted over the barrage of spells and the '_kelly-lee, kelly-lee!_' noises the creature was making.

"I'm trying to save us all by remembering what the devil I know about the wretched things. Unfortunately I do not have an eidetic memory, _The Necronomicon_ is vague at best, and it's more than two months since I last reviewed the material Lovegood supplied. And to be frank, I was more worried, with a name like Whateley, with how to survive if our illustrious defence professor took it into his head to try and recreate the Dunwich Incident. I have half a dozen sachets of powder of Ibn-Ghazi prepared back in my quarters, and some notes on an appropriate incantation which might be sufficient to vaporise a reprise of the Dunwich Horror if all else fails."

"_Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_" The creature surged ashore. It was huge and nightmarish, a seething, boiling, roiling bubbling mass of darkness. It towered a good fifteen feet tall, and now it was on _terra firma_ it started to shape itself, extending crude pseudpods, or other 'limbs' as it bore down.

"We need something which will work here and now against a shoggoth, Sev." Lily shouted back, between spells. By sheer weight, it bulldozered its way through a hasty transfigured iron fence Sirius threw up across its path. "Think!"

"Ice!" Severus finally snapped his fingers. "The only reported known land colony lived in thermal caverns under what for the sake of simplicity we'll pretend is the South Pole. But they never spread, because they don't like extreme cold."

"Freeze it!" Lily called, instantly switching her own tactics as Severus finally started casting, throwing ice-spells himself.

It was too late for Peter Pettigrew though. The shoggoth was close enough now to extend a couple of pseudopods in Peter's direction with horrible speed, and to seize the young wizard.

He gave a strangled cry which was abruptly cut off, followed by a horrible snap and rending noise, followed by a couple of wet thumps.

Sirius stopped casting and retched, violently. Remus hesitated a moment and blanched. The others paled, but kept the frantic barrage of spells going.

"_Tekeli-li! __**TEKELI-LI!**_" the shoggoth shrilled its triumph, but it was a triumph that was to be short lived. Under the torrent of ice spells now hitting it, it was starting to slow noticeably, and it had come far enough ashore that it could not retreat to the lake.

At last it stopped there, frozen, a gleaming black malevolent mass encased in ice, barely quivering.

And then rather belatedly two professors arrived, Slughorn and McGonagall, wands out. There was something not quite right about their eyes though.

"Well done, students." Professor McGonagall said. "Fifty points to Slytherin and two-hundred and fifty to Gryffindor." Then she appeared to notice Peter wasn't actually moving, and his head was several feet remote from his torso. "But a hundred points off Gryffindor for Pettigrew not surviving."

Slughorn pointed his wand at the frozen shoggoth and muttered a variant blasting curse, and suddenly frozen chunks of it were flying everywhere.

"That takes care of that. Good charm work, Evans." he muttered.

"Professor…" James began to address Professor McGonagall, the Gryffindor head of house.

"What Potter was about to say is when you send Filch out to clear up Pettigrew, could you instruct him to be careful, since it was more bad-luck on Pettigrew's fault than lack of skill or cunning that cost him his life?" Severus said. "It wouldn't be fitting to see him fed to Hagrid's pets."

"Oh." said the head of Gryffindor. "Yes, well, Mr. Snape, I shall consider your request very carefully."

James had started to splutter an objection to Severus' speech, but shut his mouth when Lily laid a warning hand on his arm. Now he frowned.

"We'll go down to the dungeons, to have a celebratory butterbeer, if that would be alright?" Severus glanced at Professor Slughorn.

"Oh what, yes, fine m'boy. Ten points for inter-house co-operation."

* * *

><p>Safely ensconced down in the dungeons, twenty minutes later, with every warding and privacy spell that Lily and Severus between them could throw over the disused classroom they were occupying, the surviving three Marauders, Lily, and Severus were taking stock.<p>

"Whatever's going on, someone's imperiused our head of house!" James Potter was outraged. "There was no way she was acting even remotely normal."

"If you're _lucky_ she's been imperiused, Potter. There are worse things in _The Necronomicon_ than the Imperius Curse. Of course you have to be an insane genius to be able to understand them sufficiently to apply them, which I am _not_, but…"

"Sev. It doesn't _matter_ what form of mind-control has been used. The point is something's been done to our head of house and to yours too."

"Well the actual specifics _might_…" Severus started to quibble with Lily, but trailed off and shrugged. "Okay, I see your point: in the general context, it probably doesn't matter much."

"They were acting as if it had been some sort of training exercise." Sirius said. "And I caught McGonagall's gaze; she seemed disappointed that if anyone had died, it was _Peter_ who had done so. There's some sort of plan going here."

"It's something supposed to happen today, if it's not happening already." Severus said. "They'd have put the school under lockdown otherwise, to stop news getting out."

"We don't know they haven't." Remus commented. "We haven't tried to floo-call or owl anyone."

"The defence professor, Whateley, is almost certainly the main motivating agent here at Hogwarts." Severus said. "Given he's been living in the Astronomy Tower with Sinistra since the start of the school year, she has to be in it up to her neck, too, either willingly or otherwise. We know they have the heads of two houses at least temporarily under control. They also have either the headmaster's blessing for what they're doing, they have him under control, or he has no idea what's going on."

"Professor Dumbledore wouldn't willingly…" Lily began to object.

"He might." Sirius said, looking slightly guilty. "You don't know half of what he's prepared to do, Lily, if it fits in with whatever his current plan-of-the-moment is."

"And assuming our Professor Whateley is related to one mentioned in several copies of newspaper articles Lovegood sent, it seems likely Whateley has read _The Necronomicon_ and may have a mind sufficiently unhinged that he had and can employ some of the things in it." Severus went on. "The good news is that what's in _The Necronomicon_ could be considered 'ritual magic' which takes a long time to prepare for and to cast. Some of it is highly circumstantial. The bad news is it goes _way_ beyond regular wand magic. We're talking tearing the fabric of time and space here, and unleashing cosmic horrors which make the thing we just fought out by the lake look like chickenfeed." Severus sighed. Then he scowled at James. "It would have been helpful if you'd accepted the truce I offered in November, as soon as I started to suspect Professor Whateley. There was no way that what he did at Hallowe'en was as harmless as he pretended. We could be in a much better informed and prepared position now, if I hadn't had the Marauders on my back all the time."

"Yeah, well, I didn't know that our defence Professor was going to be involved with _this_." James protested. "We still don't know that it's him for certain. I mean, you and your Slytherin friends could have cooked up that thing…"

"_And_ put their own head of house under possible Imperius?" Lily glared at James. "Honestly, I can't even begin to imagine how you get the marks you do in exams if that's an example of your brains."

"Whilst I'm a fan of Potter put-downs, this isn't the time or place, Lily. We need to determine what Whateley and Sinistra are doing, and then put a stop to it." Severus said.

* * *

><p>Author Notes:<p>

There are no 'witnesses' to the scene by the lake in this universe at the start of the incident - just the Marauders, Severus, and Lily. The sense of 'something unnatural' in the air is keeping anyone else away.

'Lovegood' is in this case Xenophilius Lovegood. I have no idea when he attended Hogwarts, but for the purpose of this story, I've assumed he's already left, and is pursuing interests in cryptozoology.

Slughorn and McGonagall were acting odd because they _were_ under someone/something else's control.

Apologies if the shoggoth is behaving differently (or is vulnerable in ways one might not normally be) from whatever may be 'normal' but I'm going by _At the Mountains of Madness_ here, and it seems to me, based on that, that shoggoths don't like the cold...


	2. Part 2, The Astronomy Tower

Disclaimer: I am still not J K Rowling or H P Lovecraft, nor do I own Harry Potter or various Cthulhu mythos goodies.

* * *

><p>In the end, the three surviving Marauders, Lily, and Severus (the latter stuffing his pockets with his copies of Lovegood's notes and sharing out little folded paper packets of what he said was 'powder of Ibn-Ghazi' from his private stockpile amongst the five of them) made for the Astronomy Tower. They were certain that if anything <em>was<em> going on, the Astronomy Tower was where it was most likely happening. Especially given the signs posted on all the main entrances to the tower announcing that it was 'closed for refurbishments' with the doors firmly closed, and any secret passages into it they knew of sealed shut.

The only way into the interior of the Astronomy Tower which they were able to find, without recourse to a rather overt aerial approach by broomstick – which both Severus and Sirius were against for a variety of reasons – was a small outward facing door let into the exterior wall of the tower at ground level which was apparently unlocked and _not_ magically prevented against opening to anything which they could do between them.

Sirius muttered something about how if Dumbledore hadn't confiscated James' invisibility cloak until the end of term, one of the Marauders could have scouted ahead under its cover, but they didn't have it, so went in together.

The small chamber immediately inside had a table, some parchment, and a quill, and a notice on the table to the effect that students should 'please leave any messages for Professor Sinistra here'.

"Something's wrong with the map, Moony." James Potter said, peering at a large piece of parchment that apparently had a map of the castle on it which he had produced from about his person. "It just… well."

Remus Lupin frowned and joined James, and Sirius did so too.

"That looks bad." Sirius said, sounding worried.

Lily and Severus exchanged glances then went to join them. James responded by trying to fold up the map.

"Given the circumstances, James, I don't think _now_ is a good time to be worried about trying to protect this secret." Remus said. "They need to see it. Severus might even be able to contribute something useful."

Reluctantly, James opened the map out again.

It was a map of Hogwarts, but a map with a difference, in that there were hundreds of names and dots, apparently indicating the location of students and professors, all of which were moving. Lily gasped. She saw Severus frown. He was staring at the area which should ordinarily represent the Astronomy Tower, and which was a mess of criss-crossing lines.

"It reminds me of a Maurits Escher drawing I once saw." Severus said. He _stared_ at the map hard, seeming to look almost _into_ the parchment, then shook his head and blinked his eyes. "It _looks_ to me like there are at least half a dozen additional floors beyond the normal ones inside the tower, added at oblique angles, and that there are a _lot_ of people or things in there."

"You can tell that from all of this?" Sirius looked sceptical and waved at the mess of lines and squiggles.

"I spent a lot of time looking at Maurits Escher pictures, growing up, before I came to Hogwarts." Severus bit his lip. "My… mother… was a fan of his work."

"Well the only obvious way onwards and further in is over there." Lily said, being practical, indicating a small narrow staircase which ascended into the tower interior on the far side of the room. There was a rope hung across it from which dangled a sign: 'Danger! Ongoing refurbishments. Only teachers and authorised personnel allowed beyond this point!'

"I think we count as authorised personnel." James said. "Peter's death from that… thing… out of the lake authorises us to find out what's going on and to avenge him."

* * *

><p>"I think these people are playing for keeps." Severus said ten minutes later, panting hard.<p>

The first thing the five students had found, upon stepping over the rope and ascending the narrow, tightly winding, staircase beyond, was a chamber in which the reanimated and partially revivified grey-skinned forms recognisable as three of the Hogwarts founders – Godric Gryffindor, Helga Hufflepuff, and Rowena Ravenclaw – awaited anyone arriving. Godric had been equipped with his legendary sword, which he had swung whilst the four Gryffindor students present just stared in shock and rising panic at the scene confronting them.

He would have taken James out with the first strike, if Severus had not stuck a shielding charm in the way, and the back swing was bearing towards Lily before Severus got a disarming charm off.

Severus' disarm didn't quite succeed, but it did throw the founder off-balance, ensure Lily suffered no more than a scratch across one cheek, and give Severus the chance to shout a warning to the other four to snap out of it.

Sirius had just said something dumb like 'but that's the wizard who founded our house', and to the surprise of the Gryffindor students Godric had given a ghastly croak back to the effect of 'I see only one true student worthy of Gryffindor here, and the rest poltroons and cowards, who stab treacherously and fight four to one, or speak nothing but weak words whilst their friends suffer', before recovering his balance to swing again.

And that was when Rowena and Helga lifted their wands.

Lily had screamed with fury and despair at being so repudiated by Godric, and raised her wand to blast away, providing Severus _some_ magical support, whilst Remus swallowed and then lifted his wand, but it took Sirius and James at least another twenty seconds to snap out of their shocked states.

Fortunately, whatever dark magic had been used to coax a semblance of life back into the ages old founders' corpses had left them with only a shadow of their original skills, otherwise the five students probably would have had no chance. As it was, it was still hard going, with Rowena laying down offensive fire, Helga shielding like crazy, and Godric swinging his sword trying to chop the five 'intruders' into tiny little pieces.

Severus had been obliged to remind the others that these were _not_ the founders themselves in any sense except perhaps that of their mortal shells, but some variant of inferi, and that holding back against them was pointless.

As each one was defeated, it puffed into sparkling dust and dissolved to the floor. The last to fall was Godric.

'I salute a true student.' he raised his weapon one last time to Severus, before collapsing into dust. Unlike the others, who had completely turned to nothing, Godric's sword remained.

"He was right…." Lily was shaking now like a leaf, openly crying. "Some brave Gryffindor I've been these past five years, huh, Sev?"

"I suppose we should be grateful Salazar wasn't here." James said, still pale. "I don't know if we could have taken another of them."

* * *

><p>It was nearly midnight, when they reached the giant orrery Professor Whateley had installed in whatever floor this was of the rearranged and dimensionally warped Astronomy Tower. The Sword of Gryffindor in her hands, Lily was covered with the blood and ichor of dozens of abominations. James Potter was wielding a weird crystal-powered wand-gun he'd taken from an other-worldly armoury. Severus Snape was using both his own and Lily's wand to cast with, for increased impact to spells.<p>

Behind them, the sounds came up the staircase they had just ascended of Lupin in werewolf form, and Sirius Black in animagus form dealing with the hordes of creatures that had mounted a last-ditch effort to try to keep them from reaching this room.

The whirling gears and balls of the orrery made it difficult to get a clear shot at Professor Whateley who was standing on the other side of the room, next to a slab where the near-naked muggle girl he had abducted was tied. Professor Sinistra had babbled something about a great ritual, and some of the details of a plot that was going on, two floors below, whilst laughing manically, before, as she started to mutate into _something_ else, they had been obliged to kill her.

Outside the gothic-arched windows of this chamber, unfamiliar star constellations hung in the sky, and there seemed to be at least two different moons visible, one of which was full. That probably explained why Remus could transform, at will.

"Good evening. I am in the midst of flawlessly executing what will be known, in several decades time, as a Xanatos Gambit." Professor Whateley said, putting down the sacrificial knife he had been inspecting, and picking up instead a glowing stave that was probably 'the Threefold Staff of Atlantis' that Professor Sinistra had also mentioned. "It has been enjoyable to play with you children. Obviously, it would be tremendously fun to complete the ritual of the gates at the appropriate moment, and to truly unleash Hell upon Hogwarts for a few short hours, but I have the bigger game in mind, too. The stars are pretty much nearly right for that, too. The trifling little dark wizard, Voldemort – a mere conjurer and dabbler in the arts, but sufficient to be an irritation nonetheless – was in danger of proving a hindrance to my masters in over a decade and a half's time. But now… now, thanks to my brilliance, it is nearly certain that the obstacle he presents will be removed. There will be other perks, and benefits, too, but it would be bad form of me to reveal _all_ my secrets here, in my villainous monologue. And at this point, since to talk further would be to stall or pointlessly reveal information I'd rather you _didn't_ know, let's do this, shall we?"

And he twirled the stave, sending glowing rays shooting out, and Lily, Severus, and James diving for cover.

"Lily. Get the orrery. Take it apart with the sword. James and I will do our best to distract Professor Whateley." Severus instructed.

"We will?" James frowned. "Oh, okay, then, but I'd prefer to take him down rather than just distract him."

"Potter. Our chances of actually getting anything past the staff to actually hit him are minimal. We might be able to over-load it, if we get exceptionally _lucky_, or possibly get him from behind with a rebound off a wall, but a frontal attack is never going to work whilst he holds it."

"Well, speaking as a reckless Gryffindor, I _like_ those kind of odds. And anyway, there's a pretty girl in need of rescuing. A _very_ pretty girl."

Lily rolled her eyes.

"I think your competition for me just disappeared, Sev, given the silly soppy look James has pasted on his face. Okay, let's do this, three, two, one, go!"

The battle which followed was complicated by the fact that the orrery took an immediate dislike to being hacked at with the Sword of Gryffindor, and promptly turned into a waving mass of tentacles and weird fleshy globes, which focussed on trying to apparently kill Lily, or at least to beat her senseless.

"You have brains indeed. Congratulations!" Professor Whateley said, in between shooting various suspect rays at James and Severus and either simply blocking spells which came directly at him, or trying to negate ones which targeted the environment around him.

The combination of tentacles and fleshy bits versus enraged redhead with Sword of Gryffindor and occasional supporting fire from either James or Severus proved an uneven contest however, and the animate former orrery creature started to noticeably and obviously lose. Finally, it entered a death throes shaking and thrashing wildly, before turning to a sickly pile of ichor that filled what was now a pit in the centre of the room.

The death throes had temporarily obscured the view to Professor Whateley, and now that he could be seen again he stood poised in a window, stave raised defensively.

"I depart now, to another world. Follow me, or return to your own, but know, now, that this dimensional buttress is unstable and should implode within thirty minutes, relative time, or a couple, Hogwarts time. Perhaps we shall meet again, sooner or later."

And with that, and a final laugh, he leapt out of the window.

"We get the girl, collect Remus and Sirius, and get out." James said.

* * *

><p>With what had happened in the Astronomy Tower over, the Hogwarts teachers who had been mind-controlled by whatever means seemed to be recovering, although they were currently still a bit dazed. The Astronomy Tower itself had imploded, leaving nothing but a huge gap in the Hogwarts walls and a modest pile of rubble, much smaller than it should have been, moments after Remus, Sirius, Lily, Severus, and James (the latter carrying the muggle girl, now wrapped in James' cloak for the purpose of decency) emerged from it running at full pelt. What was left of the body of Professor Sinistra was later found amidst the fallen stones, but not much else.<p>

A squad of Ministry officials arrived and removed the wand-gun from James, claiming it for the Department of Mysteries. James was sad to see it go, but the moment they had left the tower, the crystals that apparently powered it had stopped glowing.

The muggle girl, Ashley Cameron, whom James had carried out was nearly obliviated, but James insisted, very firmly, that she was his new girlfriend, and under the protection of House Potter. The Ministry officials were grumpy about this, and told James to let them know if the circumstances changed. James began to explain to her who he was, what the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy was, and just what sort of crazy world she had just been forcibly introduced into. There was a sort of mutual, gooey look in their eyes.

Sirius and Remus sat down to console one another over the demise of Peter. They hadn't had the time to grieve properly before now. There were a _lot_ of things about the past twelve hours that the four Gryffindors and lone Slytherin would find disturbing, to say the least, once they had time to sink in, but for now a combination of exhaustion and adrenaline were keeping the more serious negative psychological effects of the horrors they had witnessed at bay.

The headmaster summoned Lily and Severus to his office. He looked very annoyed about something. Probably the fact that at the very least he was going to have to replace not just a defence teacher but the astronomy teacher _and_ tower too by the start of the next school year had something to do with it.

* * *

><p>Author Notes:<p>

No Salazar Slytherin because Professor Whateley and Professor Sinistra couldn't find his corpse to steal and reanimate! Salazar, I get the impression, sort of disappeared from canon history after his argument with the other founders, but even if my impression on that count is wrong, I assume he took precautions against future body-snatchers with necromantic rituals...


	3. Epilogue, The headmaster's office

Disclaimer: I am _still_ not J K Rowling or H P Lovecraft. Likewise, I still do not own either Harry Potter, or things Cthulhu related up to and including Abdul Alhazred.

* * *

><p>Headmaster Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was not having a very good evening. That <em>nice<em> polite American, Professor Whateley, who had been so appreciative of Albus' 'for the Greater Good' philosophy and who had assured him at his job interview that he had a sure-fire way to take Tom Riddle down that Tom would never see coming had blown it. Not only had he blown it, but he had blown up the Astronomy Tower, killed one of Albus' favourite Gryffindor students, _failed_ to eliminate Severus Snape, cost Albus his Astronomy teacher, and generally left Albus with a lot of very awkward explaining to do in the near future to some _very_ curious ministry officials.

Maybe that wand-gun thing the unspeakables had taken off James would help to soothe ministry nerves. Albus could spin this as an attempt to obtain or manufacture unique equipment which had gone badly wrong. Yes, that might work.

The worst part of this debacle, he was sure, was sitting across the headmaster's desk from him. Lily Evans, fine upstanding witch that she was, splattered in all sorts of mysterious substances, and Sword of Gryffindor in hand, was currently nestled up against a bright-eyed, determined looking, Severus Snape. Albus _had_ had a long-term plan which involved pairing Lily Evans off with James Potter, helping to introduce a muggle-born into a noble house and to provide a vital, positive, lesson for wizarding society that blood-purism was an outdated and pointless doctrine. A successful marriage and half a dozen of what Albus had been certain would be magically potent Potter children would have made his case nicely. Albus had believed that he had learned from the unfortunate case of Eileen Prince and Tobias Snape: the gap between the magical and the muggle was too large to be ordinarily bridged by a union – for all that those two had produced Severus who was hardly a slouch in terms of wizardry – but James and Lily should have been beneficial and worked…

Only now five years' work was undone, and Lily was all but in Severus' arms, brought together with him in a crisis, and James had acquired a 'Damsel rescued from distress' muggle. Oh well. Maybe James, who _did_ have considerable charm and _was_ a romantic at heart, would be able to make such a pairing work where Eileen Prince had failed. If not, there was always that Perkins girl, Dumbledore had lining up, and a large vial of amortentia. Merope Gaunt's mistake, from which Albus had learned, was that she had _stopped_ dosing Tom Riddle senior with love potion. If Albus _had_ to set James up with a muggle-born to make a much-needed political point, he would _not_ make the mistake of withdrawing any love-potions. He would see them both dead, first.

"So:" Albus invited the pair of students. "The two of you are undoubtedly the most intelligent students who have participated in the events of the past twenty-four hours. Would you please explain to me, in your own words and time, Mr. Snape and Miss Evans, just what you have been doing?…"

* * *

><p>As Albus Dumbledore listened, his evening got worse. He hadn't thought it possible, but it did. Albus had never bothered to take Xenophilius' ramblings seriously, or to consider that muggle writers like that Alhazred chap might genuinely know of things of importance to the magical world. At several points he had to request memories of Mr. Snape or Miss Evans, to view immediately in his pensieve, and what he saw left him shaken.<p>

There was a whole other world of cosmic horror out there, existing quietly under the wizarding world's nose, which made Voldemort look like a picnic.

At last the tale was done, and the headmaster hoped that Mr. Snape and Miss Evans were too tired to notice just how ashen he must look.

About the only gold Albus could glimpse in this dunghill of a situation was that he appeared to have misjudged Mr. Snape, and that – if properly motivated – the young man _did_ appear to have some capacity to be decent. Well there was that and that at least Albus was possibly being presented with a partial solution to the very large pile of problems which had just become apparent.

Or at least a stop-gap measure to perhaps (however temporarily) cope with them.

"I shall see that Madam Pomfrey is notified you are to have dreamless sleep, if and when required until the end of term." the headmaster said. "I shall also instruct her the same as regards to Misters Black, Lupin, and Potter. In light of what you appear to have gone through, I shall require both your attendances, here at Hogwarts, over the summer once term concludes. I am not yet clear for how long that will be. It is possible that it may consume the entire holiday."

Severus frowned but did not demure. Lily made a sleepy 'mmphh, s'okay, if Sev'rus is here' noise. She was practically falling asleep snuggled up to him. Severus adjusted his position accordingly, to afford her greater comfort.

Albus' mind was racing. He had the Order of the Phoenix, of course, to assist with the war against Voldemort, but by the look of it he would need another, even more secret, organisation altogether different from the Order of the Phoenix to fight in the terrifying new conflict into which he had just had a glimpse…

* * *

><p>Author Notes:<p>

And there we go, a short, wrapping-things-up, sort of piece, trying to look at what Albus Dumbledore might have been thinking, hiring Professor Whateley, and hinting at how the future _could_ pan out in some respects. I'm not sure how much evidence (if any) there is in canon for the headmaster trying to matchmake Lily and James, but for the purposes of this alternate universe I have assumed an Albus Dumbledore who has been trying to matchmake them ('for the greater good' of course).

I hope readers have been entertained by this short story. At present other ideas I have are occupying my attention too much to make any spin-off for this immediately possible.


End file.
